Our summer of O2 Travel has finally come to an end and the results are in …

Well we’ve finally wrapped it. Our summer of travel with O2 has come to an end and with it our final Instagram #o2travel competition.

We thought that it was worthy of a quick wrap-up post … But then we wrote a long one instead. For those who can’t be bothered to read through it all, it was a resounding success. For those who care, read on …

For those who may be interested, here are some of the amazing pics that we had posted to us from some of our Instagrammers …

We wanted to engage with people most likely to want to use their mobiles abroad through a social and media relations platform. So Instagram seemed like the natural place to go.

With more people using the mobile picture sharing network on their phones than use Twitter via mobile, it was a great audience. We wanted to tell them that roaming in Europe was cheaper than ever – and that they could now post their photos from their travels as they happened.

So we created four weekend European breaks and offered them up to those who posted travel snaps using the tag #o2travel.

To spread the word, we tracked down and enlisted the support of six if the biggest UK users of the network. We sent them off to “road test” the new tariff and post their photos mentioning the competition and seeding the promotion – as well as talking about O2 Travel itself.

All the while, the H&G team manned the @o2uk profile, posting the competition details into the #o2travel feed so those set to it would be able to see what all the fuss was about. We also posted our favourite entries three or four times a day to generate likes, followers and spread the word – delivering the key message of the campaign: data is now affordable wherever you roam in Europe.

In a final coup, we got in touch with SunOnline Travel and convinced them to use our O2 Travellers snaps as gallery content for city guides to each of the destinations our test drives took place in.

At the final count, our three month campaign chalked up 8,428 entries. Some of those came from high profile Instagrammers including @goldie77 (50,000 followers), @faithmari (119,000 followers), @herbertshroer (38,000 followers), @janske (18,000 followers) and @Benjamin_Edward (101,000 followers) … All of which meant the word spread that much further – and that we had some amazing content to share from @o2uk.

There were over 850,000 engagements – through comments and likes – on our six Instagram road trippers’ posts. They sent back 210 pictures between them from their travels. Of those, 140 hit the “Popular Page” – the Instagram equivalent of trending on Twitter I suppose.

Our images posted from @o2uk chalked up over 19,100 Likes and 725 comments throughout the campaign. The profile now has a respectable 3,000 followers.

And through our activity with SunOnline we reached a broader base of travellers. The pieces are bang on message wise and and are to be seen here, here and here (with two more to come).

All-in-all, it’s been a cracking summer of travel with O2 Travel. And a great start on Instagram for O2.